[NOTE: Whenever I steal a bit of writing or a joke, I credit my victim. In this case, I stole something from my father. When you get to the part about the pig, you can thank dad for the simile - it was all him.]

Other than the above note in which I've admitted to stealing humor from my own blood, I have to remind you all, as usual, that you have got to read this series in order starting from Day One (where you'd expect to start, eh?).

And, unlike previous days, Day Six is being delivered in parts because it's so effing big. You might want to read the last couple paragraphs of Day Six #1 to get your bearings.

If you haven't started Day Six yet, the first part is right over here...

And, thanks, people, for enjoying this. The nicest compliments I've gotten so far were basically threats to my life if I didn't deliver the story faster. I think that's fancy, though killing me would be counterproductive to getting the story told sooner.

All the same, thank you :)

"Fix it."

Massif wasn't happy about the Battle Chicken's sudden interest in the miracle of life.

I thought it was beautiful, but wasn't going to try to explain that to Massif.

"I can't. Look what happened the first time. Do you really want Me screwing with this thing? I'll admit that I had no intention at all of inventing the Battle Chicken, nor did I expect to see it arrive with a giant udder, but that was when I was doing mY best. I was squeezing my eyes real hard and thinking, and this. this is what happened."

"If You can't start over, then at least try to make a low risk improvement."

"Like what? I don't know what you mean by 'improvement'. I'd say it's all pretty subjective at this point."

"Our troops aren't going to want to ride those into battle. Nothing about that Battle Chicken says, 'Pray for a quick death, you infidelic bastards.' The message I'm getting here is, 'Do you like them over-easy?' We need to somehow make them appear threatening. Psychology is important on the battlefield. If recent events are any indication, our mounts are probably going to be giving birth from time to time down there. You have to make them look mean."

"Well. I could give them spikes or something else sharp and dangerous."

"Think flatter. If yoU try to add spikes, YOU'd probably concentrate them around the back of the thing's head, which would make it harder for our troops not to develop a lot of holes in their bodies. It would be like an airbag except it would kill you by stabbing you in the face. Go for a paint job instead. or a symbol. Some prominent sign that we're dangerous."

"I could do a tattoo. A big snake swallowing another big snake. That'd be scary."

"Fine. I'm sure that, whatever you do, it's going to turn out horrific."

"Gotcha. Let's rock."

I closed My eyes again. I'm not sure when I got the idea in my head that clamping My eyelids shut would help in creation.

I pictured the tattoo. It was weird since tattoos aren't really supposed to go on fur, or feathers, or udders, or whatever these things had. The confusion may have had something to do with the result.

I opened my eyes.

"That's just great."

Massif was shaking his head at me again. I was worried that if he kept doing it he'd get carpal neck.

"What'd I make?"

Massif gestured at the front of the Battle Chicken.

"Well, if You look here, there is a conspicuous absence of a scary tattoo. Right here. See where I'm pointing?"

I did. His finger was aimed right at something. I was able to find the thing based on the orientation of his finger.

"In place of the tattoo you said You could make, we have a large series of red concentric circles, beginning as wide as the Battle Chicken's breast, and shrinking into the center until finally we just have a dot. If you look closely, or even from several hundred feet away, you might also notice that the circles are backlit. You've just painted brightly lit targets on the breasts of every single Battle Chicken on this mountain."

"Ah."

Massif had spotted a flaw in the design. Keen eye, that Massif.

"I'd like to think that this is going to come off as runaway bravado, suggesting a confidence so strong that we're almost begging to be attacked, but it won't. What I do think is that, thanks to the way these targets will draw attention to the breasts, we can take solace in knowing that the enemy will most likely not be targeting the udders. This gives us something to strategize on; a strength to take advantage of so that, though enemy soldiers will use this design to target every organ keeping our chickens alive with far greater precision than otherwise possible, there will be, at the end of the day, for the victor, and I refer to sandwich, hundreds of perfectly good udders strewn around town and available for the taking."

I thought about this.

"So, if we win, we get the udders."

"Yes. If we are fortunate enough to have defeated sandwich, to have leveled the evil regime, to have restored virtue to its place in the universe, and to have brought this city down, then we can look forward to days and days of udder collection so bounteous that no person on Earth will have to continue to endure life without an udder of his very own. There will be disembodied udders for everybody. My only concern is the possible devaluation of existing udders brought on by introducing so many more udders into the economy, but that's something we'll deal with later."

Soft, but excited commentary fanned out through the former gods of the crowd.

"He just said udders for everybody!"

"I want an udder!"

"Let's win this one, guys! I can't believe I'm finally getting my own udder!"

"I'm going to wear mine like a hat!"

And so on. All you need to know is that there was great enthusiasm among the troops about harvesting a set of large squirty appendages from a dead abomination. Something anybody would be excited about. It should also be noted that, regarding this excitement, Massif's sarcasm may have been lost on the crowd.

Massif surveyed the troops. He looked like someone who looked like someone who was about to speak, but he was so far removed from speaking that he could only appear like the shadow of the shadow of someone who looked like he was going to speak. It's almost as though nothing happened in that moment.

He waited for the energy to come down a notch, and then did spake again.

"I know you're all excited to get out there and do whatever it takes to ensure that you'll get to take an." Massif looked around, "udder home with you, but first, Felix, the former God of Evil, is here to give you a motivational speech."

Felix, still blackly frocked in the nighty frock of his days as the baddest god in the land, stepped out from the crowd and took his place next to Massif.

Except for that one guy who kept speaking up, the crowd shushed.

"That's a nice frock," said the idiot.

"Shut up!" said the former god next to the current idiot.

"Lighten up, buddy. That thing is frockilicious. It's a whole frocking party of a garment. What I'd give to get all frocked up in that thing. Frocking awesome."

The former god decked the current idiot, knocking him out.

The crowd broke into light applause and then hushed again.

Felix began. His speech was so long that it had to be offset in block quotes.

We are no longer Gods.

We are ordinary men.

We go into battle today to hammer sandwich's regime into dust, sweep the dust under the rug, take the rug outside to beat the dust out, vacuum the dust up, put the dust in the trash, take the trash out, wait for the garbage man to come, and then wave goodbye as the dust is carted off in the back of a garbage truck to be dumped in a landfill in the middle of beautiful, pristine wilderness where manatees will mistake it for small fish, eat it, and choke on it while they go all epileptic convulsiony because, not only are they dying from accidentally not having eaten fish, but they're all trapped in fishing nets, have the plastic rings from six-packs of beer wrapped around their necks, and can't get a hold of anything to stabilize themselves or pick off the rings and the nets because they're covered in oil from a manmade disaster that's left them all slicker than a greased pig with a runny nose. The dust will then rot in the bellies of the Earth's remaining manatees, to be pecked at by carrion birds until the birds accidentally digest the dust, mistaking it for small fish, start to lose it, take off, and then crash to the ground where they'll explode in a meat-cloud and scatter the dust even farther until it's so spread out that it'll just blend in with the land.

It will be dangerous. Most of us will die horrible, ghastly deaths. If you don't know what it's like to be beaten to death by an angry mob with shovels, then you're in luck, because today's the day. This amazing experience will be yours for the several seconds you'll live before your head is bashed in and you die.

Many of you will likely be dismembered in such a way that you will go on living, placed on spikes in the town square, and paraded around to boost morale among sandwich's forces. You'll slowly bleed to death, but it's going to be hours and hours of excruciating pain before you break on through to the other side. To get an idea of how awful it's going to be, imagine somebody impaling you on a spike and then carrying you around town so that people can laugh at you and occasionally bop you on the head with their shovels. This image is apropos, as this is exactly what will happen, though I should warn you that, however vivid your imagination, you could never imagine your way to pain and humiliation of this magnitude. Fortunately, you won't have to work on it that hard later, as reality's going to fill in the blanks for you.

We are undermanned, underarmed, undergodded, outnumbered, and about to go into battle against the most powerful sandwich in the universe as we ride the most embarrassing creatures ever made into a war we could not, under any circumstances, win without almost all of you being slaughtered.

If you see any of your comrades wounded, you cannot save them. Any such time would be lost. Every second is another that sandwich's army can get the advantage over us, so, should you see your friends bleeding but still alive on the ground, then just push them out of the way with your foot and get on with it.

Aerial support will come from Massif and Serge. It's not much, but Massif has an arsenal of weaponized tree frogs. Massif, unlike you, positively will survive. Can we get a round of applause for Massif?

The crowd, with a tad less excitement than they'd been exhibiting up until Felix's motivational speech began, clapped for Massif, trying to figure out why they were doing it. By and by, they worked out that they were clapping because they were told to, and that was good enough for them.

Rory told me that He might be able to modify our Battle Chickens so that they can fly, but He says that, even if He can do this, you'll have to milk your chicken first because the milk will weigh it down. It's up to you; you can die on the ground or in the air. To die on the ground means less prep, but if you go airborne, you should have an advantage over the enemy until someone fires a flaming arrow into the center of your Battle Chicken's illuminated bullseye and brings you down. Depending on the height from which you fall, you will either die instantly when you hit the ground, or you'll bounce a couple times and break every bone in your body. I suggest that you go for the instant death option. You'd survive breaking all your bones, and you might even survive the battle on account of the enemy soldiers thinking you're already dead, but you'll emerge on the other side of victory a total freak nobody's going to want to hang out with. If you choose the selfish break-all-your-bones option, then you'll be a burden on those of us who will survived by needing constant medical attention and someone to change your cup of applesauce and the straw through which you slurp it three times a day. Is that any way to live? I'm sure not going to change your diaper for you. Again, the quick death is better, but select your death to taste. There's no accounting for fetishes.

We won't know what kind of weapons you'll have until we're nearly to the enemy. Rory will be working on the problem on the way down. Hopefully his god powers will return in full soon enough that we won't have another one of these chicken debacles. While we're semi-optimistic that Rory won't blow it again, be alert for the possibility that your weapon, perhaps a long pointy spear, could materialize in the wrong place, stabbing you through the torso before the enemy even knows you're coming. The pointy end of the spear - again, this just a hypothetical situation - when it comes into being, might jam in through the back of your Battle Chicken's head, striking it in what little bit of brain it has, cause it to run amok, probably flip over, land on top of you, and crush you to death. On the bright side, it'll take your mind off the spear that was in the middle of killing you before the chicken took over.

If your chicken falls, you can use it as a shield if you'd like. I'd like to say that you can hang on until help arrives, but there won't be any help, so although your dead battle chicken might offer shelter, you'll just be postponing the inevitable. Best to take a running leap off the chicken into the mob of angry enemy soldiers in front of you. If you land on enough of them, you might be able to slightly confuse them before they recover. The others will beat you with their shovels, possibly denting them, which will make them less effective, thereby helping the rest of our team. It's always best to take the honorable route to death. In this case, the honorable route would be to sacrifice your life in the hope that you might dent the enemies' shovels with your skull.

There will be no formal means of communication between us. Other than the screams of your fallen fellow warriors, you will know little of their whereabouts and troubles. If this freaks you out, then feel free to use the Buddy System. Find someone who wants to be your buddy, and ride side by side with him into the fray. That way, when you're dying, your buddy can watch you. Again, this is your choice.

Massif stepped in.

"Thank you, Felix. That was truly inspiring."

Felix bowed his head in Massif's direction. Massif winked back. Nobody understood what that was about. Best not to think about it too much.

Massif continued. 

"There are two goals to this mission. The primary objective is to neutralize sandwich and restore creation. To accomplish this, we have to stop the transmission of god powers from the slaves to the scepter."

A soldier called out from the crowd, "And just how are we going to get sandwich's antenna scepter?"

"We don't. That was deemed impractical during the planning phases. Were you at the meetings, you'd know that, rather than attempt the impossible, we'll just have to kill every last slave in the city so that sandwich has nothing to receive with the scepter."

The solider's face went from questioning to understanding.

"Ah. Kill everybody in the city rather than trying to lift sandwich's scepter. That does make much more sense. Sorry. Carry on."

Massif did just that.

"Every slave killed means less power to sandwich. As Rory's powers return, sandwich's will diminish provided we can do a good job of killing slaves left and right. Eventually, there will be an equilibrium, followed by an increasing advantage on our end.

"sandwich won't yet be weak enough to defeat, and Rory won't yet be strong enough to vanquish. We expect sandwich to shut off the crown transmitter in response, as continuing to spread the signal among lesser Gods would dillute sandwich's own power. That's when sandwich's personal guard will be vulnerable. However, even without their god powers, they'll defend sandwich to the last. Serge and I will take them on while Rory faces sandwich.

"Serge will take on the bulk of the guards by impaling as many of as possible on his corn while-"

Another voice called out from the assembly, "What's a corn?"

"It's the pointy thing sticking out of Serge's head."

"Isn't that called a 'horn'?"

"That's a good question. Let's explore this. What kind of animal is Serge?"

"A flying unicorn."

"That's right. A flying unicorn. Not a flying unihorn. If it were a horn on Serge's head, then don't you think he would be a flying unihorn?"

"Yeah. I guess that makes sense."

"For example, if Serge had four corns, he would be a quadracorn. Not a quadrahorn. It's called a 'corn'."

"I understand now. I get it."

"Ok, if you understand, then what's the pointy thing on Serge's head called?"

"It's called a 'corn', sir. And I really do understand. You don't have to keep explaining."

"Oh, my apologies. You just seemed totally lost on the difference between a corn and a horn, and since this is probably your last chance to learn about it in this life, I wanted to provide you with the opportunity to rectify this stupidity."

"Thanks."

There was a brief silence.

Massif broke it.

"Corn; not horn."

"I said I was clear on this."

"I'm clear on it. I'm just not sure you are. Hey, you know what? I appreciate your speaking up. It shows bravery. To celebrate your desire to make a spectacle of yourself, I'm going to put you in the front lines. You'll be one of the first to die, but you're going to die knowing how to distinguish a corn from a horn. Be proud of that. This will also give you a cheap way out of having to suffer the embarrassment of having been such an ignoramus. Thank you for volunteering your life that more worthwhile people may have the chance to survive.

"Does anybody else want to talk about corns versus horns?"

They didn't, particularly. No.

"Good. So, Serge is going to impale these former gods with his corn while Rory engages sandwich in a final battle of Good against Evil. And don't worry, Rory. There's no pressure here. You're dangerous enough when you're working under optimal conditions, so the last thing I'd want to do is remind you that, should you fail, the universe will never recover and every living thing from here out will be a slave to a terrible, highly-motivated sandwich, the cruelty of which enabled it to build an empire from a few migrant workers and their union in just a couple days.

"I have no further words. Except for the guy who wanted to argue about corns and horns, I have the highest respect for all of you - except that guy - and I want you to know how proud I am that you're all ready to lay down your lives for a better world that you'll never, ever, ever see."

Massif stopped to think.

"Actually, Rory - have you had a chance to create the afterlife yet?"

"No. I meant to do it a couple days ago, but a sandwich stole my kingdom."

"Aw, that's too bad. You guys are screwed. Now, to the Battle Chickens!"

[Gratuitous Links to my Homies - Not Part of the Post Above] [Learn More]

I was thinking about how there are more women than ever reading my site. This makes my heart-pump pump a little faster. I think we might have in upwards of 2-3% females here nowadays. The reason for more ladies is that, back when I started this site in 2003, women still didn't know about the internet. Now they're here with the rest of us, clogging up the web with their recipe swapping and knitting advice. But we're glad to have them anyway, even if their abuse of bandwidth means the rest of us will have to wait longer to download photos of naked women in slutty poses on the hoods of expensive Italian supercars.

To show my gratitude, I'm going to thank one (female) in each Gratuitous Links to my Homies until I'm out.

This also opens up doors for a whole new way to link back and say thanks. I mean, I can start flirting when linking out now. I'll demonstrate this shortly.

- Astrid - Astrid and I've been writing back and forth for quite a while now, and I've probably been linking to her more than is appropriate. I think she's awesome even though she's part of the recipe-swapping demographic. Why women couldn't just keep to trading recipes when they gather in each other's kitchens for their Oprah book club meetings is beyond me. Anyway, I said I was going to flirt, so here goes: Astrid, I totally want to touch you on the leg.

How'd that go? Was it flirty? Maybe a little creepy? A little of both? "Crirty"? "Creety"? "Fleepy"? "Flirpy"?

Guys do it all the time. There should be a word for it.

Now, for the male element:

- Clint Rutkas - Clint's the guy who made the C# disco dance floor. He came by Channel 9 one day. I was told that there was this guy who wanted to meet me (people stopped by every now and then). He showed up, and as soon as I realized who he was, it turned around - he was a guy I'd really been wanting to meet. I interviewed him, and gave him a hug. I thought the hug was nice, but it seemed to make everybody else uncomfortable, though I know Clint liked it. His project was awesome, and he deserved a hug in a video that's been watched about 15,000 times now. Those people needed to see the 'spect I've got for Clint.

Anyhoo, he wrote to me today to ax me and my espert opinion on video editing software, so I gon' git him it in a post on Wednesday. That said, Astrid would be a far better resource, though she might be too professional to know how to advise us cheap-ass Handycam dorks. As Cliff said, she's a "cinnamontog. cimanym.tog. synonymtograf." I don't know how to spell the word either, but it's pronounced like "cinnimootohgrahfur". It means she knows how to take photographs of movies or something. I don't know. I can't figure it out. I just know that she does something with cinema and tographering.

One last note about Clint - his domain is "betterthaneveryone.com" - that's total geeky bad-assness. I love it.

That's all for tonight (today? this morning? I guess I'm up kinda late).

Be well, everybody.